Streetcar

The efforts of the Baltimore Streetcar Campaign, a grassroots group, to attract support for a streetcar line from the Inner Harbor to University Parkway give me hope for the city and reminds me of what citizens groups have done (and not been able to do) in the past ("The Interview: Robin Budish, community organizer for Baltimore Streetcar Campaign," Feb. 4). In the 1940s and1950s, small groups (mostly streetcar riders) were unable to stop the destruction of the Baltimore Transit Company's streetcar lines as they were systematically demolished by the highway lobby, which had gained control of the company.

Robin Budish spends her days rallying support for an idea she says will make downtown Baltimore more livable — building a streetcar line along Charles Street. Budish was hired last fall as community organizer for the Baltimore Streetcar Campaign, a grass-roots group that believes a fixed rail trolley system would attract residents, boost civic pride, spur economic development and benefit tourism, retail and cultural institutions. Budish, the former executive director of Fells Point Main Street, and also a former Historic Charles Street Association executive director, has been meeting with downtown residents, business owners and other stakeholders.

The Rev. Edwin Austin Schell, a retired pastor who was a historian with an "encyclopedic knowledge" of his United Methodist Church, died Nov. 25 at St. Agnes Hospital after suffering a fall. He was 88 and lived in the Charlestown Retirement Community. Born in St. Louis, he worked for the streetcar company there as a young man and developed a lifelong interest in public transit. He moved to Washington, D.C., and worked in scheduling administration for Capital Transit. He joined Calvary United Methodist Church and was encouraged to enter the ministry.

Earlier this month on an insufferable Baltimore summer's day, the only thing my colleague and friend Jacques Kelly and I wanted after work were a couple of tall cool gin-and-tonics. And in pursuit of those wonderful English Raj heat beaters, our journey to McCabe's took us out Falls Road. As we came abreast of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, there sitting in the middle of the North Avenue streetcar loop, chained to a piece of track fixed aboard a flatbed truck, was a harbinger of winter.

James C. Robertson Jr., a retired Baltimore police officer and a streetcar buff who was a longtime active member of the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, died Saturday of respiratory failure at the Oak Crest Village retirement community. He was 100. The son of a physician and a homemaker, Mr. Robertson was born in Baltimore and raised at the foot of Broadway and later in a rowhouse near Patterson Park. He was a 1929 graduate of City College and earned a bachelor's degree in history and political science in 1935 from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he also played varsity football.

Harry G. Gesser Jr., a retired Bendix Radio engineering draftsman and a lifelong rail and streetcar fan, died March 16 of kidney and heart failure at St. Agnes Hospital. The former longtime Woodlawn resident was 85. Mr. Gesser was born in Baltimore and raised in West Arlington. After graduating from Forest Park High School in 1943, he began his career working for Bendix on East Joppa Road in Towson. He entered the Navy in 1945 and, after serving for a year, resumed his career as an engineering draftsman.

'Pushing boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine' Where: National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 48 East Patrick St., Frederick When: Through Friday. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday What: The traveling exhibit, titled "Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine," was created by the Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and details the history of African Americans who served in a medical capacity during the war. One of those profiled is Maj. Alexander T. Augusta, who took a stand— nearly 100 years before Rosa Parks — against discrimination by refusing to give up his seat on a streetcar in Washington.